"You don't go look at a Rothko; you go inside a Rothko." - Claire, visitor, National Gallery of Art

Modern art. Two little words that strike so much fear in the heart of the average museum goer. When you're used to straightforward, legible paintings and sculptures, Modernism can be pretty destabilizing. Pretty weird. Canvases are now spattered with paint, or lined with grids, or barely containing the shapes that seem to want to float away. A car tire is cut apart and reassembled. A giant mobile floats in the air, catching the breeze. 

And it's natural to ask, well, what does this mean? What is this piece about? How did I just go from Post-Impressionism to Fauvism to Cubism to Futurism, when the subject matter of these paintings all kind of look similarly shattered and rebuilt and hastily glued back together again? How could I ever understand the nuances of this stuff without a graduate degree? 

But I promise you, you can.

Learn more.

See the images.

Music Used:

The Blue Dot Session, “Tall Harvey,” “Highway 430,” “Ranch Hand,” “Cornicob,” “The Melt,” “A Common Pause,” “Within the Garden Walls,” “Basketliner”

"Questions and the search for answers, and the appreciation of beauty, and then wanting to share it with other people, to go look at it closely together. Then you realize you've got something that can feed you for the rest of your life as a career." - Emily Pegues, curator, National Gallery of Art.

Museum curators are an intimidating species. Those experts with their degrees. How could they possibly remember what it was like to walk into a museum for the first time and feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of history on display? How could they imagine what it’s like to be a visitor who doesn’t care about a landscape with cows? After all, we’re not born knowing the stories these paintings tell, or how to seek them out.

In the second episode in our series, we’re going to explore how a long look into an artwork can inadvertently engage another sense: hearing. Hearing the stories that a painting can tell. And the curators at the National Gallery are here to help. Help put us in the best possible position to receive these stories; help us listen to what these paintings are saying to us. And how to imagine these stories moving through the centuries, embracing us the way they once embraced them for the first time, and making them want to do what they do.

Learn more.

See the images.

Music Used:

The Blue Dot Sessions, “Gentle Son,” “Pinky,” “Origami Guitar,” “Arizona Moon,” “Tangeudo,” “The Melt,” “Lina My Queen,” “Brer Rhetta,” “Georgia Overdrive”

"There are different levels of looking. And it's exciting to bring people to the different levels."  - Estelle Quain, docent, National Gallery of Art

How do YOU feel when you walk into an art museum? Is it familiar? Intimidating? Do you have a guard trying to shush you, or an overly-enthusiastic friend trying to tell you what to like? Are you joyful? Are you sad? Are you… bored?

You’re not alone. Whether it’s your first time in an art museum or your 10,000th, everyone’s going to respond differently. That’s why we made this podcast.

In June of 2024, I was honored to be the Storyteller-in-Residence at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. I spent a week in the museum talking to and recording as many people as I could: curators, museum staff, visitors. We talked about what brought them to the museum, and what keeps them there. We talked about what makes the museum experience transcendent, and, bluntly, what can get in the way of that - what stands in the way of connecting with an artwork, what makes them feel like they never learned the secret knock to access this world. After all, in order to make a space inviting, you have to understand why some people can feel left out.

In this three-part series, a collaboration between the National Gallery of Art and The Lonely Palette, we’re going to explore the idea of what it means to open yourself up to an art museum, one artwork, or conversation, at a time. And how the tools to do this have been here for you all along, literally in plain sight, just waiting for you.

Today, in the first episode of our series, I talked to various museum staff about preconceived notions of art that visitors bring with them to the museum. We discussed how their jobs are to meet visitors where they’re at, and to encourage them to go further. To look longer.

Learn more.

See the images.

Music Used:

The Blue Dot Sessions, “Brer Rhetta,” “Greylock,” “Alustrat,” Vela Vela,” “Caprese,” “Setting Pace,” “Our Fingers Cold”

“I was showing the America I knew and observed to others who might not have noticed.” - Norman Rockwell

Whether arguing for soft versus hard taco shells or the Neo-Nazi right to march in Skokie, freedom of speech is a fundamental right we all enjoy as Americans. But it turns out that telling people that is pretty complicated, actually. Thank goodness we have Norman Rockwell, virtuosic photorealistic painter and America's crown prince of nostalgia, to help us understand our fundamental freedoms from the intimacy of the magazines fanned across the coffee tables inside our homes.

See the images.

Music used:

The Andrews Sisters, "Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen"

The Blue Dot Sessions, “The Zeppelin,” “Lord Weasel,” “No Smoking,” “Transeless,” “Silver Lanyard,” “Ice Tumbler,” “Sino de Cobre,” “Georgia Overdrive,” “The Consulate”

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"Walter, let's go for a walk."  - Judith Wechsler, in the arcades of Paris.

Professor Judith Wechsler is an art historian, filmmaker, writer, researcher, Francophile, and leading expert on Paul Cezanne and Honoré Daumier. She’s the daughter of a major religious philosopher. Her resume reads like a who’s who of 20th century art historians – Meyer Shapiro, Linda Nochlin, Leo Steinberg, Gershom Sholem. Her films tell the story of 20th century Europe, image by image.

She was also my grad school advisor. And she’s now a dear friend. Hers is the voice that lingers in my head, reminding me to show my work. Her background in dance and filmmaking speak to someone who, like me, sees art and art history as something that can be understood not just academically, but creatively, and interpreted creatively. You just need to make sure there’s a net below that cliff to catch you.

We all have a mentor, and Judith is mine. This conversation is deeply personal. It’s the story of a student, and her teacher, and the questions and answers that craft our journeys.

Episode webpage

Music used:

The Blue Dot Sessions, "A Little Powder," "Basketliner"

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“It is not about fixing or mending, but about celebrating the vulnerability of the object and ultimately myself.” - Yee Sookyung

Shattered porcelain is impossible to repair. As impossible as fully, and accurately, reconstructing the past. But who needs that pressure? What if, instead of tossing those shards in the dustbin of history, we acknowledged that the thing will never be what it once was? Maybe then we appreciate the beauty, and the human resilience, of what new things it could be, in the now.

See the images.

Music used:

Billy Joel, “You May Be Right”

The Blue Dot Sessions, “Littl Jon,” “The Dustbin,” “BlueGarden,” “Nesting,” “A Rush of Clear Water,” “A Common Pause”

Leonard Cohen, “Anthem”

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"It's the close focus that draws me into a sound. And then it sort of spreads out and spreads through my body. And I let that happen, and I'm listening in a different way." - Annea Lockwood

The artist and composer Annea Lockwood is not just any musician. She is an artist of sound. She is a composer of art. Her music is performance art, and her art is always, always audio-rich and musical. She sends her microphones into the elements – fire, here, and rivers, in a recent series called Sound Maps, where she captures, among other things, the tonality of the different depths of the water. She loves chanting, tones, drones. She loves what sound does to our body, how we respond to it, how we visualize it. How sound breathes. How we breathe differently around different sounds.

And for me, as an art historian who fell in love with sound, I get it. I think I get it. And this is what today’s conversation is about. Annea joined me to talk about what it means to listen with your body, to experience the silence in all the noise, and the noise in the silence. We talk about the value of musical training versus musical instinct. We talk about how rivers sound different from one another (they really do!). And we explore what an artist from New Zealand who gained prominence in the 1960s burning pianos can teach us about the art of sound, and what she can learn from her 85-year-old self, today.

Episode webpage

Music used:

The Blue Dot Sessions, "Brer Rhetta," “A Common Pause,” "Tanguedo"

Episode sponsors:

Art of Crime

The Seattle Prize

Visual Arts Passage

Support the show by becoming a patron or by just sending us a tip.

"The only thing permanent is change." - Felix Gonzalez-Torres

There is no way around it. The work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, a gay, Cuban-American artist who responded to - and died during - the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 90s, is sad. His work is a memorial, both to a lost generation and to his own partner, Ross. Yet it is through these seemingly banal, industrial, or every day materials, and the powerful metaphor that they represent, that we can best get to the root of what loss can mean. And, maybe, healing as well.

See the images.

Music used:

The Blue Dot Sessions, “A Little Powder,” “Lerennis,” “Taoudella,” “The Melt,” “Rafter”

Open Book, “Second Chance”

Episode sponsors:

Art of Crime

The Seattle Prize

Visual Arts Passage

Smartist App

With extra special thanks to Martin Young.

Support the show by becoming a patron or by just sending us a tip.

“In the end, what interests me is the way art connects with life. Because otherwise, I don’t quite understand what it’s for.” - Sebastian Smee

Sebastian Smee has been the art critic for the Washington Post since 2018, but has written extensively about art for every publication you can think of, from here to his native Australia, and winning a Pulitzer prize for criticism along the way. Both his prose and his love of the work leaps off the page and into your lap, offering a guiding hand past the velvet rope, not just for his readers, but for himself: he’s a critic who is constantly looking inward, curious about his own responses to artworks, and what it can teach him about teaching us.

Sebastian joined me to discuss his latest book, “Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism,” as well as writers on writing, becoming an expert about a movement on deadline, how looking back at the muddiness of a historical moment can help us understand the muddiness of ours, and what happens when art critics are themselves at a loss for the words to express why they just love this or that painting so darn much.

See the images.

Music used:

The Blue Dot Sessions, “Town Market,” “Night Light,” “Brass Buttons”

Episode sponsor:

The Art of Crime Podcast

Support the show by becoming a patron or by just sending us a tip.

"My line does not illustrate. It is the sensation of its own realization." - Cy Twombly

Critics have described the work of consummate scribbler Cy Twombly as at once "barely there" and overly academic, but what about us art civilians? What is it about these half-baked scraps, scratch, and scrawl that speaks to our own creative impulses, our own inner children dying to grab the crayon and crush the tip in an ecstatic series of fat, juicy loopdeloops?

See the images.

Music used:

The Andrews Sisters, "Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen"

The Blue Dot Sessions, “Inessential,” “Tiny Putty,” “A Burst of Light,” Palms Down,” “Parade Shoes,” “City Limits”

Episode sponsor:

The Art of Crime Podcast

Support the show by becoming a patron or by just sending us a tip.